A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  “The little one is Robbie,” Viola said as she tilted her glass to her mouth. Robbie was one of those big, sturdy babies who was undeniably male despite his pale curls and elaborate, lacy, christening gown. “And of course the boy is Will. He’s about four there.”

  “He looks older.”

  “It was his height, those long, gangly limbs. August always thought of him as older, always expected so much of him, but he was really just a little—” Viola’s voice caught. She took a gulp of cognac.

  “He looks so happy,” Nell said. There was something heartbreaking about that guileless smile, the solicitous little hand on his baby brother.

  “Will adored Robbie. He was never jealous, like some older siblings. All he wanted was to play with him and take care of him.” Viola’s hand shook slightly as she snapped open the second case. “This was taken in June of fifty-eight, before a ball to benefit the Children’s Aid Society.”

  The photograph was of four handsome young men in white tie, lounging in what Nell recognized as the Red Room downstairs. Robbie, looking like a gilded young god at about twenty, was seated on his mother’s favorite piece of furniture, the thronelike Japanese chair elaborately carved with “guardian lions.” The adolescent Harry sat perched on an arm of the chair, his grin precociously cocky, a hand resting on Robbie’s shoulder. In contrast to the older three, whose eveningwear was classically austere, Harry wore a waistcoat of gaudily-patterned brocade. Will and another young man, whom Nell didn’t recognize—light brown hair, fair skin—stood in back, framed by an enormous Japanese painting of a hawk in the snow.

  “That fellow standing next to Will is Leo Thorpe’s son Jack,” Viola explained. “He was Robbie’s best friend, about a year older. They were still in their teens when Will started dragging them to saloons and gaming hells and God knows where else. For the week or two every year that Will was in this city, it was always just the three of them.”

  “I heard Mr. Thorpe say something about making his son a partner in his law firm.”

  Viola nodded. “Poor Jack, he really never wanted that, but Leo has his ways...” She sighed and took another sip of cognac. “Jack joined the Fortieth Mounted Infantry along with Will and Robbie right out of law school. When the war ended, he took a job in Washington instead of coming back here to join Pratt and Thorpe, which greatly upset Leo, since he’s the only son. But this past Christmas he moved back to Boston, and the next thing I knew, he was unofficially engaged to Orville Pratt’s daughter Cecilia. Leo and August have their differences, but they’re very much alike in one respect. If there’s something they want, they eventually get it.”

  Too true, Nell thought, studying the photograph. “Were Harry and Robbie close?” she asked, taken by the fraternal affection of that hand on the shoulder.

  “Oh, yes, Harry adored Robbie—everyone did. He was one of those people who just...shines. There was something about him, a special grace, a light. Harry was three years younger. Mind you, he was a little wild even back then, but he worshipped Robbie.”

  “Was he jealous of Jack?” Nell asked. “Because of how close he and Robbie were?”

  “I think so, but he managed to keep that under wraps fairly well. He never got into any serious trouble until the war, but then, without Robbie around to try to please, well...” Gravely Viola added, “When he heard about Robbie’s death, he went a little mad, I think. Started drinking and didn’t stop for days, wouldn’t go to the mill. He hasn’t been quite the same since then.” She shook her head. “I feel responsible. I should have done more for him.”

  “William feels the same way. He regrets not having guided him more effectively.”

  “He shouldn’t. They were so far apart in age, he and Harry. And Harry was a hard one to guide. He still is. He’ll do something utterly outrageous, and seem so contrite about it, even devastated, but then the next day it’s as if none of it ever happened. Do you know he started a fistfight over a woman after a service at King’s Chapel last year? He beat the poor fellow unconscious right there in front of the church. An hour later, he was laughing about it over Sunday dinner. It cost August five thousand dollars to keep him from being prosecuted.”

  Nell nodded as she sipped her cognac. “I heard about that.”

  “Did you hear about the time he got arrested for public indecency?” When Nell shook her head, Viola said, “It was about five or six years ago. He went for a little midnight swim in the Frog Pond with two...women of the town, and by the time the police arrived, they were...well...no longer swimming.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Leo handled it,” Viola said, her words slurring together. “Leo handles everything. All those ghastly little dramas with Harry’s mill girls... The pregnancies to be dealt with, the husbands to pay off, the gambling debts, all those fines for public intoxication... I just worry that someday Harry will do something money can’t put right. Will was no angel either, but at least he was only arrested the once that I know of, when they raided that brothel back in fifty-three.”

  “Until now,” Nell reminded her.

  Viola drained her glass and reached for the bottle.

  “Was William ever jealous of Jack’s friendship with Robbie?” Nell asked.

  “Oh, no. Will was...well, not so much above such petty emotions as...apart from them. I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

  “Yes,” Nell said. “I know what you mean.”

  Touching the photograph thoughtfully, Viola said, “I think this was the only time I’d ever managed to talk Will into attending one of the charity balls. Frankly, I was hoping he’d meet some suitable girls. His taste ran to...well...” She took another sip of cognac.

  What a sensation he must have caused that night! The “suitable girls” would have gone wobbly in the knees; their mothers, if they had any sense, might have steered them toward safer prospects.

  “He disappeared from the ball after about twenty minutes,” Viola said. “Came home the next morning with his tie gone and his shirt open, reeking of whiskey and perfume. August was seething, of course. Will calmly packed a few things, as he always did, and left. We didn’t see him for days, but Robbie eventually found him and talked him into coming to Cape Cod with us. Will loved those summers at Falconwood—although he usually stayed by himself in the boathouse. He said he liked the lapping of the water against the dock. It infuriated August, of course, but I think it was preferable in his mind to having Will in the main house, where he’d have to deal with him.”

  “Mr. Hewitt...” Nell began carefully. “He seems to... I mean, it seems as if he...”

  “Loathes Will?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And why do you suppose that is?” Viola asked.

  Nell hesitated.

  Viola lifted the glass to her lips, smiling over its rim. “I can’t be shocked, remember?”

  It was what she’d said the night Gracie was born, when she’d asked Nell why she thought Annie would choose to give up her own child. Is it because her husband isn’t the father? Nell had asked.

  Viola was waiting.

  Nell couldn’t say it.

  Viola drained and refilled her glass.

  “Mrs. Hewitt,” Nell said. “Do you really think you should be drinking this much?”

  Viola turned away, maneuvering her chair rather clumsily, given the glass in her hand and her mounting inebriation. She wheeled squeakily over to Nell’s bed, a far too big four-poster, and adjusted a pillow; it was a nervous habit of Viola’s to conduct these little inspection tours when she had something on her mind. “I heard the story of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s own lips when I was seven years old—did I ever tell you that?”

  It took Nell a second to digest this conversational detour. “No.”

  “Mary’s father, William Godwin, lived near my father in London, and they were friends.” Viola straightened the lace runner on Nell’s dresser, sipped some more cognac. “My mother died of childbed fever after I was born, and Father never r
emarried. He was a respected man, a baronet, but something of a freethinker, like Godwin and his crowd. He brought me up with the same education and opportunities as if I were a son.”

  Viola moved on to the fireplace, where she took a poker to the smoldering embers. It was a handsome hearth with a carved oak mantel, the centerpiece of a spacious room that was flooded with sunlight during the day, thanks to tall windows on two sides.

  “I grew up questioning everything,” Viola said as she stirred the embers into ashes. “Religion, the monarchy, marriage...in the abstract, mind you, from an academic perspective. It was one thing, in my father’s view, to espouse, say, free love, and quite another to practice it. His dream was for me to travel and paint and meet fascinating people, and then marry for love—some enlightened aristocrat with a tidy income, preferably. He adored me. He wanted the best for me. And he...he trusted me. He always told me I deserved the freedom he gave me because he knew I would never do anything foolish.”

  She shook her head. “When I was twenty-two, I went to Paris to study painting. The École des Beaux-Arts didn’t admit women, so I spent over a year just copying paintings at the Louvre. But then I met... Someone introduced me to...” she sighed and took another drink “...Emil Touchette.”

  “Touchette?”

  “He was a painter,” Viola said without looking up from the glowing ashes. “It was an extraordinary world, Paris in the thirties. Poets and writers and artists flocked there, and we were all trying to challenge the old order, to do something new and fresh and outrageous. We were la Bohème, and Emil Touchette was one of our princes—but the critics scorned him because he wasn’t mired in the past. He believed in capturing a moment on canvas, a fleeting, breathless impression.”

  “It’s the same thing you’re always telling me,” Nell observed.

  “Oh, he was brilliant, he truly was, quite ahead of his time, despite his...well, he could be terribly imperious, quite full of himself, but I worshiped him anyway. Not only because of his work but because of his...presence, his...mystique. He was a commanding man, very tall and well-built, with this great mane of jet black hair. I got stupid just looking at him.”

  Nell chuckled as she raised her cup to her lips, not because it was particularly funny, but because she recognized the feeling. It was precisely how she used to feel with Duncan. His beauty had stung her heart; so had everything else about him.

  “Emil invited me to study privately at his atelier in the Latin Quarter,” Viola said. “I was so proud to have been one of his chosen. And, oh, how my heart would pound when I noticed him gazing at me...” Suddenly she looked very sad. “I didn’t know—until too late—that he was in the habit of seducing his female students, and that he had a wife in Boulogne.”

  “Oh.”

  “By the time I returned to London, I was four months pregnant. I was desperate, and devastated, and far too mortified to tell my father—he would have been so ashamed. My sister Bertha was the only person I confided in, and she was appalled. So was I. I didn’t feel remotely enlightened or sophisticated, quite the opposite. I’d been weak and gullible and wanton. Another month passed, with me fretting in secret over what would become of me. Bertha gave me the name of a French midwife who would...cure such dilemmas for a price, but by then I’d felt the baby move and I just...I couldn’t.”

  No wonder Viola had been so understanding of Annie McIntyre’s predicament, Nell thought.

  “Father had begun to tease me about growing plump,” Viola said as she took another drink. “My panic had reached the level where it was almost paralyzing. I rarely left my room, took all my meals there. Father had a deuce of a time convincing me to join him for Easter dinner. We had company, you see, and he didn’t want to entertain them alone. One of his guests turned out to be a young man from Boston whom I’d met two years earlier, while he was making his grand tour.”

  “August Hewitt,” Nell guessed.

  Viola nodded. “He’d tried to court me back then, but I’d put him off. He was handsome enough—quite dazzling, really, with that silver-blond hair and those unearthly blue eyes. But he’d seemed so staid, so ridiculously pious, while I, of course, had fancied myself quite the free spirit. But that evening, over Easter dinner, he struck me as...” She shook her head. “He seemed so good, so fundamentally decent—especially as compared to Emil. It was a mild night, so I slipped away after dinner and went into the garden to be alone. He followed me there. He told me...” Viola smiled. “He said he always used to think I was a bit too thin, but it appeared that my appetite had improved, and I was all the more beautiful for it. I burst into tears. He led me to a bench and offered me a handkerchief. I blurted it all out, about being pregnant and at my wits’ end and Father not knowing.”

  “Really? What...what did he...”

  “At first he just stared at me, in utter shock. I instantly regretted having told him. He asked who was responsible. I told him only that it was someone I’d known in Paris, a married man of low character who’d deceived me. August assumed I’d been all but forced...plied with absinthe, perhaps, and taken against my will, and, God help me, I let him believe it. He stared off into the dark for about a minute, and then he asked me to marry him.”

  “Oh.”

  “He told me he loved me, that he’d always loved me, and that he didn’t blame me for what had happened to me, and would put it entirely out of his mind and raise my child as his own. It was the answer to my prayers. Within weeks, we were man and wife. We spent the next two and a half years touring Europe. Will was born in Tuscany. When August brought me back to Boston, people just assumed the baby was his. August let me bring Paola back with me, even though he felt I should have a proper French lady’s maid, like his mother and sisters. And he had this house built in the Italian style to please me—I’d loved Italy, and he wanted me to be happy here.”

  “Have you been?” Nell asked, although she thought she knew the answer. Viola Hewitt was an iconoclast whose youthful indiscretion—and the marriage that had saved her from it—had effectively imprisoned her for life in the granite-walled bastion of propriety that was Brahmin Boston. Like her son William, Viola felt a measure of contempt for this “hollow, gold-plated world,” a world that Nell would give anything to have been born into.

  “Happy?” Viola mused. “I was happy when Will was little and still living here with us. I was astounded by the depth of my love for him. August...he tried to love Will—I truly believe that. He wanted to be a good father to him. He didn’t want to rear his sons as he’d been reared, with whippings and beatings. He tried to discipline Will with...he called it ‘firm reason.’”

  “Did Will need disciplining very often?” Nell asked.

  “He wasn’t routinely willful—not in my estimation—but August felt that young boys should be taught to be mannerly and in complete command of their passions. If Will became excitable in any way—if he laughed out loud at the dinner table, for example—he would earn a lecture on the evils of intemperate behavior and be isolated from me for the rest of the day. That was awful for Will—and for me, as well, because we were very close. The next morning, August would order Will to get on his knees and ask for forgiveness, but even when he was very young, Will would never kneel. That incensed August, and he would send him back to his room. I would be in tears, but Will was always dry-eyed.”

  Viola drank in silence for a minute. “When August first suggested that we send Will to live with my sister Bertha in London, I refused to consider it. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. I knew Will and August would never get along. The older Will got, the worse it would be for him—for all of us. So I finally gave in. He was five when he left—Nurse Parrish accompanied him on the crossing. That morning, on the dock, waiting for him to board...” Her voice broke. “Oh, Nell. He begged me not to send him away. I started crying. So did he. He... Oh, God.” She swiped roughly at the tears welling in her eyes. “He knelt. He did it, finally. He ran up to August and got
down on his knees and pleaded with him. He told him he knew he’d been bad, and that was why he was being taken from me and Robbie, but he’d be better from now on. He promised. He’d be everything August wanted him to be. August finally had to haul him forcibly onto the ship. He screamed and sobbed all the way up the gangway. God forgive me.”

  At a loss for words, Nell lifted her cup to her mouth, but her throat was too tight to swallow. This, then, was the source of Viola’s terrible maternal guilt, having allowed her husband to cast away the child he’d sworn to raise as his own.

  “Will’s first couple of years in London were fairly uneventful,” Viola said when she’d pulled herself together. “I think he was trying to be good so that August would let him come back. He didn’t get on with his cousin, though—Bertha’s son Archie—so she sent him to off to boarding school when he was eight. He was a model student then, but a real hellion in his teens—he’d get caught drinking, or sneaking women into his rooms, or playing cards for money. Eton expelled him, and Harrow came close. August tried to discipline him during his summer visits, but it was no use. He’d run off for days at a time, and only Robbie could find him. He finally settled down a bit at Oxford. I was pleased when he decided to study medicine at Edinburgh, but August felt it was unseemly for someone who carried the Hewitt name to go poking and prodding at other people’s bodies. Of course, Will didn’t care one whit for August’s opinions. He excelled in his medical studies, and when the war broke out, he came back and enlisted as a surgeon.”

  “I take it he knows Mr. Hewitt isn’t his real father,” Nell said, “otherwise he wouldn’t have called himself Touchette.”

  Viola nodded. “My sister let it slip to Archie, and of course he took great relish in telling Will he was the bastard of some failed French painter named Emil Touchette. Will was about thirteen then, and getting ready to enter Eton.”